My grandfather probably spend 20 hours a week doing home genealogy work.
Going back to I guess the 80s, he always had the latest and greatest computer system in his home.
He wasn't super technical, but he knew how to use them for the things he cared about.
One year he hit an issue with a store-bought computer. I forget what the issue was, but he probably spent $5k on the computer, and it had hundreds, if not thousands of his work hours saved on it, and customer support led him down a path that wiped his hard drive.
After that, he would say, "Computers are light light bulbs, you can't trust them after a certain point..."
He complained about the customer support being so bad, so I told him we could just build one from pars if he wanted.
His eyes lit up, "You'd build me a computer?!"
So every 2 years, we would get together and build him a new computer.
He bought all the parts, and we'd build identical computers, one for him one for me... some of my fondest memories.
He got such a kick out of running performance benchmarks. 90-something year-old kid in a candy shop. He had to have the best parts.
From 1996 to 2016 or so, he had probably the most powerful gaming rig in Midland, TX... He had 3x 4k monitors, surround sound, and crazy silly amounts of RAM. Like... 128 GB was the last machine we built, back in 2016.
He'd always donate the "old one" to the church. I remember one year the kid they sent out had some IT knowledge. He was trying to write up a donation receipt, and Grandpa was like "64 gigabytes..." and the kid, thinking it was some old clunker since it was just sitting in an old Costco fruit-box at that point, was like, "Oh, you mean 64 megabytes of memory..." and Grandpa was like, in the most assertive tone an ultra-polite Mormon could muster, "No, sir. I mean gigabytes." This was like 2008 or so, when most high-end computers didn't have more than 8 GB of RAM. And Grandpa was just like, "It's got some old Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 Quad-SLI video cards..." And the kid was like, "Wait, how many video cards?" And Grandpa's attitude was like like, "Take that trash away, it's old and busted. Get it of my sight!" Ha.
He may have also liked playing flight simulators just a little. (=
I can imagine his computer ending up in a variety of places depending on the personalities in his local church leadership xD
I learned to carry a PortableApps USB stick and a Puppy Linux USB stick with me every time I went to church meetings, just in case. One night I ended up tucked in a church library alone (under certain circumstances a random dude needs to stay in the building while other meetings happen), found a donated computer (nothing like your grandpa's!) and after digging around for cables for a while, had my Linux desktop up and running, streaming some prosaic public-access TV or something while reading Slashdot.
I can't imagine how that moment would have felt if the computer turned out to be a 64GB RAM monster...I think I seriously would have considered bringing my home computer to swap with it. I remember others being told to do the same, in cases where the waste was even less obvious (and I mean I even once had to turn away a guy who tried to donate a vial of gold he panned in Alaska to the church)...but wow, yeah that's a big deal.
(There were actually so many genealogy-computer shenanigans at the churches...someone could easily write a very interesting book about that)
Stories like this are an awesome reminder that advancements in computer technologies are absolutely worth it. Computers are tools, a means to an end, and if they make someone smile then they served their purpose magnificently.
Going back to I guess the 80s, he always had the latest and greatest computer system in his home.
He wasn't super technical, but he knew how to use them for the things he cared about.
One year he hit an issue with a store-bought computer. I forget what the issue was, but he probably spent $5k on the computer, and it had hundreds, if not thousands of his work hours saved on it, and customer support led him down a path that wiped his hard drive.
After that, he would say, "Computers are light light bulbs, you can't trust them after a certain point..."
He complained about the customer support being so bad, so I told him we could just build one from pars if he wanted.
His eyes lit up, "You'd build me a computer?!"
So every 2 years, we would get together and build him a new computer.
He bought all the parts, and we'd build identical computers, one for him one for me... some of my fondest memories.
He got such a kick out of running performance benchmarks. 90-something year-old kid in a candy shop. He had to have the best parts.
From 1996 to 2016 or so, he had probably the most powerful gaming rig in Midland, TX... He had 3x 4k monitors, surround sound, and crazy silly amounts of RAM. Like... 128 GB was the last machine we built, back in 2016.
He'd always donate the "old one" to the church. I remember one year the kid they sent out had some IT knowledge. He was trying to write up a donation receipt, and Grandpa was like "64 gigabytes..." and the kid, thinking it was some old clunker since it was just sitting in an old Costco fruit-box at that point, was like, "Oh, you mean 64 megabytes of memory..." and Grandpa was like, in the most assertive tone an ultra-polite Mormon could muster, "No, sir. I mean gigabytes." This was like 2008 or so, when most high-end computers didn't have more than 8 GB of RAM. And Grandpa was just like, "It's got some old Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 Quad-SLI video cards..." And the kid was like, "Wait, how many video cards?" And Grandpa's attitude was like like, "Take that trash away, it's old and busted. Get it of my sight!" Ha.
He may have also liked playing flight simulators just a little. (=